by Rudy Rucker
“Chandler! From Knowledge College.”
“Jack! Is that you?”
“It is, and I believe that’s my stash,” said Jack in a firm but friendly way. “I’d like it back if you please.”
Chandler shook his head. “Finders keepers,” he said. “That’s the rule here. But I’d be glad to roll some up for you.”
And so he did. His twists were almost as tight as Jack’s.
“Anybody got a match?” asked Chandler, passing the cigs around. “Tobacco and matches are hard to find here.”
Jack pulled a kitchen match from the pocket of his jumpsuit. “Here’s hoping,” he said, “that strike-anywhere means works-in-both-worlds.”
Turned out it does.
We all had a smoke while Jack and Chandler caught up on past events. “Finding out there’s only this one extra universe threw me into a tailspin,” said Chandler. “I was ready to quit being a professor. For some insane reason, I started moonlighting at KFC.”
“That explains the weird duds,” whispered Amara.
“Workers at KFC don’t dress like Colonel Sanders,” whispered Darly.
“Have you ever looked in the kitchen?” hissed Amara.
“Talk louder!” I snapped. “But be quiet.” I wanted to hear Chandler.
“The KFC job was a mistake. All that slimy, pimply skin. The nodules of fat. Sure I’d been depressed about the alsoverse, but now I was suicidal. Back in my pathetic rented room, I let the bad feelings take over and I started to—attenuate. Evanesce. Dwindle. I slipped through a crack, and into the alsoverse.” He paused, looking around. “Yes, I found another world—but I’m stuck inside it. And it’s a dump. Come see.”
He led us across the field to where it ended on a low bluff.
“So much stuff!” said Amara. “Like my cousin Jessie’s yard.”
Indeed. We were overlooking a wide barren plain studded with pyramids of junk that rose even higher than our bluff. The sky was all in shades of cream and peach.
“There’s a pile of giant keys,” said Darly, pointing at the closest of the mounds.
“And funny shaped surfboards,” said Amara, pointing to another nearby heap.
“Those are guitar picks,” said Jack. “Don’t forget, we’re tiny.”
“I’m bigger than a guitar pick back home,” protested Darly. “Why should I be smaller than one here?”
“We look smaller because we’re further away,” said Amara comfortably.
“Farther from what?” I asked.
“You’d understand if Chandler and I could teach you the rudiments of space-time-scale continuum mechanics,” said Jack.
“But such an attempt would be quite quixotic,” said Chandler. He and Jack exchanged a snobby, knowing look—bullshit artists that they were.
“You see, Bert?” said Amara. “I’m right.”
I stared out across the plain. Each of the vast plain’s ziggurats of pelf held a different category of lost items. A gargantuan haystack of long legs and platter-sized lenses—glasses. A cathedral of gold hula hoops—wedding rings. A ticking stack of menacing machines—watches. A mountain of single socks. Other less easily categorizable mounds stretched into the distance as far as the eye could see. But there, only a quarter of a mile off, was—
“A pile of pills,” said Jack, pointing “We’re here for my bluegene meds,
“Who are those people?” said Darly. “Look at them down there.” Milling mournfully among the mounds were men and women in regular clothes, busy as ants.
“Stackers and sorters,” said Chandler. “Missing persons, like me. People who let themselves disappear. We never talk. We spend our time arranging this crap. As if it might come in handy some day.”
“You do this for occupational therapy?” asked Jack.
“It fills the time,” said Chandler with a shrug. “We’re stuck here for good. We might even be immortal. If the crows don’t eat us.”
“You mean those big birds flying around?” said Amara. Her google glasses were glittering away. Documenting the scene.
“I think they’re pretty,” said Darly, who found many things pretty. “What do they want?”
“Hard to say,” said Chandler. “Sometimes one of them snatches up something shiny and carries it off. To where, I don’t know. The other crows always chase the one that’s flying away. Like they want to follow.”
“The crows are in charge?” asked Jack.
“Maybe,” said Chandler. “Sometimes a crow will swoop down and snack on a slacking stacker or on a loitering sorter. That’s why it’s risky to be idle.”
Amara mimed a shiver.
“You’re slacking on your own right now,” Jack pointed out. “Smoking my Bugler.”
“The crows honor me because they like my second-hand smoke,” said Chandler. “Watch this.” He took a drag and blew the smoke straight up. One of the birds caught the scent and came spiraling down.
I shivered when the iridescent black crow landed in the field beside us. He was the size of a private plane, with wide wings, a broad back and a stubby neck. He sat back on what passed for haunches and lowered his head so that Chandler could blow smoke into the nostrils of the great beak.
“These guys are smart,” said Chandler. “You gas them up with smoke and they’ll do what you tell them—for a while.”
“Hhhhmmmm,” said Jack. “What if you were to tell him to fly me over to that pile of pills in the distance, so I can score some bluegene?”
“Why not?” said Chandler. “Seeing as how you gave me this Bugler. And the matches too.”
“Good deal,” said Jack.
“Once you have your bluegene pill, you’ll come back and help with the stacking and sorting, right?” said Chandler. “We’re always falling behind.”
“Sure,” said Jack. “As you say, we’re stuck here forever, and there’s nothing else to do, and life sucks. And all this stuff might come in handy someday.”
“Are you nuts?” I asked Jack in a whisper.
“Shut up,” he murmured. “Do what I do.”
Chandler blew more smoke into the great crow’s nostrils and he chirped at the crow from the back of his throat. “Get on now,” he told us.
Jack perched on the crow’s neck like he was mounting a dragon. The women and I nestled into the dark feathers in the middle of the crow’s back. The great wings beat the air and we rose, skimming along the underside of the peachy clouds of the alsoverse.
Below us, the mournful missing persons were sorting and stacking: coins and pen-tops and contact lenses, hairpins and hats, sausages, credit cards, batteries, screwdrivers—
“Hey!” I yelled, “There’s my hearing aid!” It lay atop a stack of such devices, all types and sizes, like an exhibit at a medical museum. Fairly unpleasant to see, some of them waxy and carrying that disgusting geezer vibe. At Jack’s bidding, the gigantic crow swooped down and circled so that I could snatch my hearing aid from the pile. Compared to my present size the thing was, hell, the size of an orange crate. I managed to tuck it into the crow’s plumage. Maybe I could jigger our relative sizes if and when we got back home.
Jack looked back from his perch on the crow’s neck and grinned.
“I want a guitar pick,” called Amara. “For a souvenir.”
No sooner said than done. The crow circled back to near where we’d started, and the boogie-board-sized plastic pick was soon wedged among the feathers, nestled beside my cumbersome hearing aid.
“Are you steering this bird?” I called to Jack, raising my voice against the wind.
“Yeah, baby!” he exulted. “Remember back at Journey’s End, when I got my knees replaced?”
“Sure I do,” I said, though I didn’t.
He slapped his thigh. “I can guide this bird with my knees, like a Sioux warrior on an Indian pony. Titanium!”
“I want my dangly gold earring,” said Darly. “I can see the pile over there!”
“Hold your water, ma’am,” said Jack, putting on
a cowboy accent. “I want me a giant bluegene pill.” He dug his titanium knees into the crow’s neck, and off we soared toward the bumpy pastel peak of pills.
“It should have been my turn right now,” said Darly sinking into a sulk.
“Hush up and help,” said Amara, as we approached the mountain of pills. The sorters had been slacking here, and the pills were all colors. Guided by Jack, the crow circled until Amara spotted the right one. The bluegene pill was hard to snatch, being the size of a Christmas turkey, but soon it was stored beside my big hearing aid and the oversized guitar pick. And now we buzzed the earring pile.
“There it is!” cried Darly. “That cluster of shiny sticks on top.” She leaned out, reaching for it like a kid on a merry-go-round—but the crow forestalled her, snatching up the jangly earring with his beak.
“Hey!” squealed Darly.
“Kaw!!” answered the crow from the deep in his throat, holding tight to the earring in his beak. Some of the other crows had noticed our crow’s score, and they were swooping towards him, as if wanting to steal his cargo, or wanting to tag along.
With the grace of a trained athlete, our crow arced up into the apricot-colored heavens. He did a loop, an Immelman turn, and a barrel roll. We held on for dear life. And now we’d shaken the pursuing crows.
“What’s happening?” I shouted to Jack.
“Hang on!” he cried. Far from steering the crow with his knees, he was clinging to a feather with his legs trailing behind him like pennants.
Pale peach mist surrounded us. Amara was screaming and Darly was whining and I was about to throw up. Like a stunt flyer at an airshow, the crow executed a wrenching screwball loop. I closed my eyes in terror. I felt electricity in the clouds.
I saw a flash of light. And all went dark. And all was still.
I opened my eyes. Darly, Amara and I were still clutching each other. The crow’s wings were outstretched like a vulture’s and we were gliding out of the clouds. Jack was smiling.
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
“Aerobatics,” he said. “Climaxing with the most difficult maneuver of all, the Mobius Twist. Designed by the legendary barnstormer Lincoln Beachey, but never publically performed. The Mobius Twist is thought to be what caused Amelia Earhardt to disappear. It must be what the crows use to get from our universe to the alsoverse and back.”
“They do?” I said. “We’re home?”
Jack pointed down. Below, I saw lights, a stream of lights like stars. I saw the familiar shape of the London Earl’s shabby roofs. The crow lighted on our porch slab and, with a fluff of feathers—rather rudely, I thought—deposited us and our recovered cargo on the concrete. He flew off with Darly’s golden earring jingling in his beak.
“Thief!” screamed Darly.
“We’re home,” I said. “Was that by design, Jack, or dumb luck?”
“Both,” said Jack. “I suspected the crows could somehow fly back and forth between our world and the alsoverse—without changing their size. So I steered the crow to Darly’s shining earring, it awakened his thieving soul, and voila…”
“But how did you know he would stash it right here, in Goshen, Kentucky?”
“That part was the dumb luck,” said Jack.
“There’s still a problem,” Amara reminded us. She pointed at the corner of the porch where her cat was eyeing us hungrily from the shadows.
We four humans hadn’t grown back to normal size at all. We were so small that, compared to us, Jack’s bluegene pill was the size of a turkey, Amara’s pick the size of a surfboard, and my hearing aid the size of shipping box.
“Shit,” said Jack. “We’re in the wrong position on the space-time-scale continuum.” I nodded in solemn agreement.
“Karing Kate has a product that could help,” said Darly, opening her pink leather case. “Supersize Me. It’s experimental. Hold onto your loot while I rub this stuff on.”
And that’s the end of the story, more or less.
The girls slept over with Jack and me for a change, and we woke up happy—all of us smelling faintly of Karing Kate Supersize Me. Not only had the ointment grown us back to proper size, it had amplified the bluegene pill, the guitar pick, and the hearing aid along with us
So ever since then, Jack chips his daily bluegene dose off his turkey-sized pill. No more grubbing for tiny pills on the bathroom floor. I hooked my oversized hearing aid to my squid phone and we use it for a boom box, and so what if I’m half-deaf. Amara made her giant guitar pick into a coffee table. She says she can see supersized Waddy fingerprints all over it.
As for Darly’s earring—like I said, it ended up the size of an earring, spirited off by a crow the size of a crow. Darly shakes her fist at every crow that flies by. But she does it in her signature good-natured way—and her gesture looks like a kindly wave. Just as well. You wouldn’t want to offend the secret masters of the cosmos.
Oh, and Jack won his Golden Pi! He submitted some video clips from Amara’s google glasses, and the high academic mandarins sent Jack the award via UsFedEx drone. The drone even hovered there to listen to Jack’s acceptance speech, wherein my friend thanked all of us, even Chandler, even the crows.
The award was round, of course. And quite shiny, almost like real gold.
Jack lost it, of course. He thinks it might have rolled off the porch.
That’s why he’s on his hands and titanium knees in the weeds.
Me, I’m looking up at the sky.
Nothing is lost.
Copyright © 2014 by Rudy Rucker and Terry Bisson
Art copyright © 2014 by Chris Buzelli